What’s New in WPF 3.5? Here’s Fifteen Cool Features…

A lot of WPF developers know that Visual Studio 2008 will include much better baked-in support for WPF - the "Cider" team have delivered a WPF forms designer, high-quality XAML Intellisense built on top of a XAML language service rather than an XSD, a full set of project templates and integration between WinForms and WPF design-time views. But not so many people are aware of the enhancements we're making behind the scenes to the core WPF runtime, both in terms of polishing off a few rough edges and adding a small number of targeted features that will unblock a few key scenarios.

I thought I'd steal liberally from a presentation the famous Kevin Moore (of WPF Bag'o'Tricks fame) delivered at an internal field conference this week, and give you a quick run-down of some of the new capabilities you'll find in this updated release. Make sure you download a copy of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 and check out both the design-time improvements and the enhanced platform features.

Most of the performance improvements and some of the feature improvements will also be included in a forthcoming service pack for .NET Framework 3.0 - I don't think we've talked externally about delivery mechanisms for this at this stage, however.

For more information, your first point of reference should of course be the Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 documentation. I'm going to see if I can film a Channel 9 video with Kevin over the next week, so we can demo some of these new features to you. Feel free to add a comment to this blog if there's something specific you'd like to ask for more information about, and we'll try to capture it.

I fired up a 3.0 XBAP in Firefox and it just worked! Very cool! So far this feature hasn’t gotten any real coverage, so it would be nice to get some details on how it works, what are the limitations, (no forward/back integration), etc.

1) What do you mean by "fixed animation glitching issues". Does this mean there is no need to resort to "CompositionTarget.Rendering" anymore?

2) Could you elaborate on the improvements to data binding and how they can be taken advantage of. What are the best practices for achieving high-performance data binding over a large data set given the new enhancements?

We’ve been told they are already accelerated on Windows Vista. Do you mean they are now accelerated on Windows XP?

To what extent? I mean there are just plain Opacity property and there are full per-pixel Alpha channel transparency using Window.AllowsTransparency. Which kind of transparency is accelerated and on which platforms/OS versions?

Its useful to have the video. But, as best I understand it, currently this video is the only available documentation on these functions. That situation suggests that someone has dropped the ball. Good documentation on LINQ has been available for more than a year now. Some priority needs to be placed on providing real documentation and samples on the WPF XLINQ integration and WCF integration.

by Don Burnett Okay I am just tired of hearing these kinds of things, so I am going to speak on this subject. I am only going to do it once, and speak to what is publicly known on this subject. Some people have asked why they should upgrade to Vista too,

by Don Burnett Okay I am just tired of hearing these kinds of things, so I am going to speak on this subject. I am only going to do it once, and speak to what is publicly known on this subject. Some people have asked why they should upgrade to Vista too,